The New York-based band Ava Luna is almost unmistakably compared to Dirty Projectors, a rock band that uses a certain critical distance from rock band conventions, with a talented, screaming singer-guitarist, ambitious singers who use the language of backup harmony but do more than that, and a tendency to get shrill for effect.
Yes, that’s good. The difference between the two bands points to many of Ava Luna’s strengths, especially on its third album, “Infinite House”.
Here’s what you get more of with Ava Luna and less of with the other band: a devoted belief in dance rhythms, a casual interest in harmonic development, a self-contained and playful attitude, and the creation of a unified band sound in real time.
Most of Ava Luna’s members grew up in New York, rather than arriving after the colonization of Brooklyn, and you can hear their own connection to the new wave of early 80s funk, such as Konk and Liquid Liquid. and Dinosaur L and Tom Tom Club. The magic is in the open space: it’s the music that lets you in. When you enter, Carlos Hernandez’s singing can determine how long you stay. He spends a lot of time singing in falsetto, and he delivers soulful phrases-a series of seductive songs stretching between Al Green and Prince.
This band is friendly but strange. It has a practical sound, especially in the rhythm section: it creates notes with strong bass lines and exciting chord progressions that can open and linger, and yet the best songs here – “Tenderize,” “Roses and Cherries,” and especially “Billz,” which is a marvel of this band’s dynamics, its “Darling Nikki” – closed in three and a half minutes.
For his chance to continue, he chose “Victoria,” a good groove over which the band members fiddled aimlessly with the lead and distortion for seven and a half minutes. There is a certain deliberate perversity here and a certain trust in the flexibility, forgiveness, and loyalty of the audience. These are also New York things.